Sunday, 29 September 2013

“He must strive continually to think of, and use,
form in its full spatial completeness. He gets the solid shape, as it were,
inside his head - he thinks of it, whatever it’s size, as if he were holding it completely enclosed in the hollow of his hand. He mentally visualises a complex
form from all round itself; he knows while he looks at one side what the other
side is like; he identifies himself with its centre of gravity, its mass, its
weight; he realises its volume, as the space that the shape displaces I the
air.”

There is popular music and popular cinema and
there is actually popular sculpture. Much of it is what we would usually call
ornaments. Some of it is mini’s. Minis are sculpture for the masses in the same
way as pop is music for the masses.

It is a kind of invisible art.

Constraints shape thought. The mind is a little
like water. Any particular thought will usually choose the path of least
resistance to its assumed end. Total freedom often leads to general blandness.
See the melange of modern fantasy.

When constraints are introduced. (I think of them
as patterns of activation rather than constraints.) The thought is displaced
from its track. Like a river being dammed. It must find a new route through
usually untouched pastures of the mind and make unusual connections to be what
it needs to be.

The most powerful and creatively interesting
constraints are those of different kinds.
If a D&D character has to be a cleric but cannot worship any stated god in
a D&D book, that is two constraints from within a very similar field. If
the cleric has to be created in five minutes because a train was late, that introduces
a constraint from a different level. If it needs to fit into the poetic
formation of a sonnet, that is another, if it needs to be generated from a
memory of your real life then this is another. Constraints imposed from
different levels of reality are the
most powerful

I have been thinking about the overlapping
constraints under which big companies make popular sculpture and they fascinate
me.

How many?

The Fiction. Every mini is linked to and
feeds back into an overarching fiction, so each mini must encapsulate and even
move forward a bit of the story. It has to have continuity with what came
before.

One of my favourite things about 40k lore is the
backward technology. In the 40k verse older technology is always better and
most of it is lost. R&D is forbidden. To make something better you have to
actually find an archive and mine it for already existing designs. This makes sense
of the insane tech levels in 40k, especially in human culture. Old and new,
recently discovered and long forgotten all mixed together almost incoherently.
If game designers want to invent something new they just have something old
discovered. This means designers get to invent what they want, so long as it
makes artistic sense. It feeds back
into the power of the fiction because everything is old and decayed and no-one
understands it.

Stories need inherent technology to talk about the
future so that we understand it now. Star Trek has post-relativistic speeds,
gravity control, matte reorganisation and AI. A society with those things would
look and act like nothing we can recognise. So the tech is used but the
implications are ignored.

40k gets around this by inventing an incoherent
culture. It’s brokenness adds emotional and aesthetic power rather than taking
it.

Capital. If it’s made by a major
corporation then it will be affected by what the market wants. Space Marine
models outnumber Imperial Guard models because everyone wants to play Space Marines.
The company semi-accidently hit something that jams right in to the adolescent
male mind. It does so in an interesting way. It’s like a pop hit of popular
sculpture. Everything they do almost has to hang somewhere around the orbit of
Space Marines as they drive profits. If we look back at the fiction constraint,
they need to live inside a universe that justifies the existence of Space
Marines.

It will be affected by what the company thinks it
can persuade people to want and by what makes the most money. The company has
worked out it has a higher profit margin on very large very expensive kits. Now
every army has one. Would you like a giant multi-part GW kit? Buy two for your
apocalypse game. The creation of these mega-kits has been enabled by shifts in…

The Means of Production. It needs to be
mass produced. The materials and the techniques change. Generally you are
trying to fake a figure that occupies three dimensional space with a technology
that wants to make long thin things. Old models were usually arranged across a
single axis. So instead you make it in parts, the parts get snipped off the
sprue and attached a different way so it occupies 3d space in a more fluid way.
Computers can scan in complex shapes for mass production.

Materials. Lead holds differently to pewter
which holds differently to plastic which holds differently to finecast resin. Metals
are heavy and need special glues to make them stick so its hard to build big
multipart models without special skills. Plastic bends under heat and glues
super easy so that effects things for the consumer.

(Some of what we think of as an ancient style of
sculpture is based on how granite carries detail. Granite is a hard rock. It
survives when others wear. Its hard to cut so you have to use simple bold
designs. Those designs last so they
become symbolic of time. The material affects the form which affects the
culture.)

Architects of old large buildings would shift the
level of detail in the building depending on its distance from the viewer. Fine
detail in the distance is often bad detail because its fineness fades when seen
from a long distance away. Detail on a battlefield might work in the same way.

USE! This is where popular sculpture is
really different to any other kind of art. The guy who designed Space Marines
gave them that unusual highly distinctive upper body profile because the player
is always looking down on them from above and they need to pop against a mixed
background. Warhammer fantasy minis need to click together next to each other
on square bases as a regiment while also forming a semi-realistic impression of
something going to war.

It’s assumed that the user will and should want to
alter the product. Means are designed specifically for the end user to do that.
Is there any other form of art in which it is assumed that the consumer is also
a minor creator?

Painting is a whole other thing. So far as I know
the west hasn’t painted sculptures since Greece. Except we do.

Emotion? This may be a sub-constraint of
story. Most warhammer minis need to not look stupid when they are posed alone
away from a combat, but also no look stupid when rammed right up next to
another model in hand-to-hand. This often strands them in a kind of
strangulated emotional space. There are exceptions, sort of.

(The guy who designed this mini based it unconsciously
on his grandfather, he only realised when it was finished. You can’t see here
but the characters hand is held behind it’s back and clenched into a fist.
Which, ok, isn’t that subtle. But for 40k it is.)

I suppose where I am going with this is that it
makes more sense to think about minis as a form of popular art and to assess
them along with elite officially-art sculpture in a similar relation as that of
pop music to classical music.

Except if you brought in assessment of ALL the
things working on a model design and how they all knit together to make
something you are talking about it in a way I think no-one has before.

I can’t help but think that if you took some GW
sculpts, filed off the details, leaving them as abstract shapes, then grew them
is size and took them to a gallery, they would be regarded as art and possibly
as high art.

Art has movements and markets and the mind of the
sculpture but it doesn’t have a fucking universe to draw from and account for.
And it isn’t for the people. It’s for some people. You can go and buy some
remarkable forms of art right now. And the creators assume you are capable and
willing to alter and adapt them to your will. You are invited to do so. You are
invited to use the art. You can hold
one in the palm of your hand.

Has anyone done this kind of criticism or analysis? It sounds like somebody should have I know nothing about
sculpture. If anyone does have anything interesting to add to this, or can direct me to anyone who has done original thinking on it then please
do let me know.

Tuesday, 24 September 2013

This is here for anyone who hasn't already seen it on G+. Or twitter, or my desolate facebook page.

So parts of Pariah's of the Earth are in the new Spolia magazine. This is an Internet-only literature thing put out by Jessa Crispin the editor of Bookslut. I think that makes it about as legit as stuff on the internet is likely to get. Click on the picture to go there.

(IT COSTS MONEY TO BUY AND I GET PAID SO DON'T PIRATE THAT SHIT. PIRATE COMICS, PORN AND BREAKING BAD LIKE EVERYONE ELSE YOU FREAK, LEAVE LITERATURE OUT OF IT.)

That really annoying waffly man did a long thing in the guardian about the importance of gatekeepers and editing and how pimping stuff on social networks is demeaning and too many writers and free writing pushes down the pay for real writers but regrettably no-one seems to have edited it or done any quality control because its fucking long as fuck and dull but hey, at least its free, and on the internet.

"Amazon wants a world in which books are either self-published or
published by Amazon itself, with readers dependent on Amazon reviews in
choosing books, and with authors responsible for their own promotion.
The work of yakkers and tweeters and braggers, and of people with the
money to pay somebody to churn out hundreds of five-star reviews for
them, will flourish in that world. But what happens to the people who
became writers because yakking and tweeting and bragging felt
to them like intolerably shallow forms of social engagement? What
happens to the people who want to communicate in depth, individual to
individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word, and who
were shaped by their love of writers who wrote when publication still
assured some kind of quality control and literary reputations were more
than a matter of self-promotional decibel levels?"

Anyway this is me yakking and tweeting and he's right it's demeaning as fuck, and tiring. I've already put this on three social networks and I feel eaten away at my core. But this is my blog so if I don't pimp it on here I am reneging on the internet soul-exchange deal right?

Probably the real nerds will want to wait until it comes out in a complete form some time next year (maybe?), but if you are into literature there's a bunch of other stuff in there.

If you are one of those people who like bragging about the gang they are in (and I suppose we all are a little bit in moments of weakness) then you can tell people on forums and stuff that this is probably the first time that stuff from a monster manual has been featured in a literary magazine.

That guy who thinks V Baker is a cult leader trying to destroy gaming will probably have a prolapse and come up for a shitty new acronym for OSR Swine. Pretentious, Impudent, Guilt-free, Swine (P.I.G.S?). I don't even know what swine meant in the first place.

Personally I think of it as a victory for unstable shut-ins of all kinds.

Monday, 23 September 2013

I think BLDBLG guy a while ago proposed a city in which each
district had a different legal planning system. So like how in modern office
buildings the doors and windows and walls and ceiling and whatever all have to
be up to spec and there are legal arrangements they have to fill. And the
different legal requirements of different nations or jurisdictions are part of
what give spaces an individual ‘feel’.

So if there was an ancient culture that built lots of tombs,
like the Egyptians. Then they would have favoured historical architects, and a
kind of pattern of arranging things. Traps yes, but also how long and far
things should be, how deep and which doors, how to arrange rooms in the proper
spiritual configuration.

So if you wanted to you could type up a kind of one-page (no
need to go crazy) design plan for each culture that built dungeons in your
world. You could use these notes when making dungeons for your sandbox and try
to follow them and improvise as much as possible within the cultural strictures
laid down in the text. Like a real architect would do. Writing within
constraints might make you more imaginative and even if they never get the
notes they can still work out the logic.

And you could do it
in the voice of an ancient forgotten architect-priest addressing future generations.
And then those notes could be an actual book hidden in a library or hidden
place in that world. So if players rob the library or collection, you just give
them your design notes for that book.

Then, though they don’t have the map to any particular dungeon,
they understand the logic of all of those kind
of dungeons. So they know the treasure room will always be towards the north,
at the end of a long hidden passage, and that the number of traps will always
be a prime number, and they will always try to take off particular body-parts in
a particular sequence. You are looking for the decapitation trap just there. There has to be an upward secret
passage from the kings tomb in case his soul comes back and needs to escape.

And then you could have one very ancient culture tomb
invaded or re-engineered by a later culture and they constraints would be
layered on each other and interact in all kinds of interesting semi-predictable
ways.

(in addition to this and in no way related to it. My friend
Noisms once wrote a piece about dungeoneers being rentiers because they don’t
generate any new wealth, just waste rescources looking for old wealth. It got
me thinking about how an economist would account for wealth transmitted between
cultures separated by thousands of years. So if the death-obsessed over-culture
buries like 50% of their stuff. Then 5000 years later new people invade the
ruins and start ‘mining’ them. Does that connect the two economies across the ‘dead’
or inactive intervening years, could you then analyse them as one economy, separated
in islands of time?

And. Could there be a genius right-wing economist who is
totally theoretically enraged by the ‘dead’ or inactive wealth buried beneath the
ground and at the pointlessness of it and the horror of all the money not doing anything, that they would go crazy
and start demanding that people start digging it up and recovering it and
spending it and using it any way they could just to end the economic illogic of
it all. Like if Ayn Rand* (maybe?) or Hayek* (maybe?) was advising an insane
king and they were just “we have to dig up ALL the tombs, NOW, all funds must
be liquid, both on, and below the earth. No un-owned capital! Anywhere! Ever!”

So then you get the culture of dungeoneers. Grave robbing is
now a state-approved and practical job with a hierarchy and bureaucracy and
everything)

Veins of the Earth Hardcopy

‘They've knocked it out of the park. Hit it for six. Got it in an arm bar in the first round. Pick your sport, pick your metaphor, doesn’t matter: the point is clear – so soon after _Fire on the Velvet Horizon_, Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess prove once again that something as unlikely as an RPG supplement can be art, of the most impressive kind. An amazing work.’ - China Mieville

FIRE ON THE VELVET HORIZON

"Superpositioning with strange panache, Velvet Horizon is an (outstanding) indie role-playing-game supplement, and an (outstanding) example of experimental quasi-/meta-/sur-/kata-fiction. Also a work of art. Easily one of my standout books of 2015." - China Mieville" Maybe my favourite thing we've made. If you like Scraps work click the pic.